Traditional information management systems store and retrieve documents on the basis of attributes such as the name and storage location of a document. This, however, can get very unwieldy in typical usage, as more and more names and locations of documents become a part of the storage and retrieval scheme. Although it is possible in some cases to search or order documents by other attributes, such as content and time of creation or revision, it may still be necessary to specify which file folders, directories, or storage devices to search. If a user no longer remembers how a particular item of information was stored in a traditional system, it may be difficult or impractical to retrieve it efficiently.
In an effort to alleviate these and other concerns with traditional storage and retrieval systems, and to provide a more effective and natural approach that better fits the way people tend to work with and think of items of information, a new system described herein uses approaches that rely primarily on an intuitive, time-associated way of dealing with information. The system is stream-based in that it creates time-ordered streams of information items or assets, beginning with the oldest and continuing through current and on to future items. An information item or asset in this system can be any type—a file, an email message, bookmark, IRL, memo, draft, scanned image, calendar note, photo, shopping list, voicemail, rolodex or business card, a video clip, etc. When a user tunes in a stream, ordinarily a receding parade of documents appears on the screen. The closest are nearest in time. When a new document arrives, for example when a new email message comes in, it appears at the head of the stream, at the front of the parade. (When a newer message arrives, it steps in front of the parade.) Further-away documents are older.
Ordinarily, a user stands at the line current in time and looks into the past, but the stream also extends into the future. If the user has a meeting next Tuesday at 10 AM, a note to that effect goes into the stream's future, and a note about a meeting Wednesday goes in the stream in front of the note about next Tuesday. Documents in the stream flow steadily onward, as time does. Documents in the future part of the stream flow toward the present; documents in the present flow toward the past. Newly arriving documents push older documents further into the past.
The receding parade of documents is an efficient way to present information on a computer screen. The display uses foreshortening for a perspective effect to pack more information into limited space. For easy browsing, when the user touches a document on the screen with the cursor, a summary of that document with a thumbnail vies appears immediately, without requiring clicking or other user action, as a browse card—a dedicated small window besides the receding parade of time ordered documents. The user controls the displayed stream with VCR-type controls, to move forward or back, to go toward or to the beginning or the end of time in the stream, to now, or to any date or time, past or future.
An item of information in a stream need not be given a name, or a designation of storage location. In a traditional system, a requirement that all documents have names can have implications beyond the necessity of inventing and remembering names. For example, emails may not have names of their own but may need to be stashed inside some other file; to search for an email the user may need to go to this special mail file and search that file. In the system disclosed here, items of information such as emails do not need to be named and can be searched along with any other types of information items.
Searches in the disclosed system can be by a combination of three methods, search, browse, and time-order.
Time-order in itself often makes it possible to locate documents. Often the user needs a document that showed up recently, this morning, or two days ago, or at some time that can be pinned down with some degree of accuracy. Time-order together with browsing through the stream (and its glance views) makes it possible to glance quickly through the documents that are from the approximate time of interest and quickly pull out the right one. (While traditional systems can time-order documents it often is difficult to intersperse in the list all recent emails, news updates, bulletin-board postings, URLs and other documents, let alone voicemail messages. Without a browse feature for a stream as disclosed herein, such a list can be of little value, whereas with browse and an all-encompassing stream that gets updated promptly with new material, one can sweep over large numbers of documents, get instance glances (summary, thumbnail, etc.) of each and find the right one fast.)
When searching in a stream in the disclosed system, the user gets a new stream—a substream. One can search on any word or phrase, as every word in every document is indexed, on document types and metadata, and on time-related data (e.g., show me all email from last March). If the user searches for an entity called Schwartz Bottling, the new substream will the narrative or documentary history of all dealings with that entity—first contacts, subsequent internal documents or communications, reports, calendar items, and so on.
A substream in the disclosed system is in some ways similar to a folder or directory in a traditional system. Instead of a “Schwartz Bottling” folder in which the user has put documents by so naming them, he/she has created a substream with those document, and can save it for later use or create it again as needed. The substream can do all a folder can but is much more powerful than a folder. A substream collects documents automatically; the user has to put documents in a folder by hand, one by one. A substream can persist in that it continues to trap newly created or received documents that match it. If a user looks at the “Schwartz Bottling” substream tomorrow, she/he may find it has grown to include a new email or other documents that were interspersed automatically. A substream can tell a story, and include the future. A substream is non-exclusive, in that a document can belong to many substreams. A folder in a traditional system imposes on computers many of the obsolete, irrelevant limitations of a physical filing cabinet drawer or folder. A substream is an organizational tool that can make more efficient use of computer characteristics than an analog of filing an retrieving physical documents.
One reason for the efficiency of the disclosed system is that it handles all types of different documents, or items of information, in essentially the same way, even if the document is of a type or format unknown to the system. Each document when created, received or otherwise encountered is treated consistently according to a universal Document Object Model (DOM). As described below in more detail, the system processes the document to create its Document Object Modes that includes various aids such as significant information about the document including items such as summary, type of document, thumbnail of the document, who is the document' owner, who has permission to access the document, keywords, command options, time stamp, index, etc. This creation of a document's DOM is done automatically, although the user can aid the process. It can be done by a translator agent or programmatically.
The system creates a glance view or browse card of each document that has the same overall format to make searching for and working with a document more intuitive but also is specific to the documents in many ways. One important difference from traditional systems is that the browse card has command buttons that match the type of documents. While the command set for traditional systems may use the same command button set for different types of documents, in the disclosed system the command set that shows in the displayed browse card is specific to the document—it has the unique combination of command buttons that make sense for that document. The command buttons unique to the browse card can be shown on the card itself or separately.
The browse card comes on the screen automatically when the cursor is over the corresponding document in the displayed stream; the user need not take any other action such as clicking on the document or taking an action calling a program that can open or work with the document.
The universal DOM of a document is created automatically as a new document of any type is added to the basic stream of information items. It is done for any existing, legacy documents, when the system is first installed on a computer, and is done as any additional documents are created or otherwise come in. Metadata such as owner, date, access permission and keywords are created as part of this automatic process.
Access permission is a part of a document's metadata, so permission levels need have the constraints of traditional information handling systems where a group or an individual typically has access to all documents in a particular folder or directory, or has a particular type of access to a folder.
Search results are integrated into a substream, at the right place, when and as they become available. The user can start using an incomplete substream and watch it build up. If the search must extend over a number of computers or even servers, and some are unavailable at the time, the results that come in when any become available are integrated into the substream at the right places.